The grey wolf (Canis lupus) has generated fear and hatred. Seen as a danger to livestock and people, the once widespread predator was nearly completely eradicated from western Europe and most of the contiguous US in the 19th and 20th centuries. Pro- and anti-wolf groups now duel over how the species should be managed as populations have rebounded in places over the past few decades. American wildlife biologist Diane Boyd, 69, has spent 40 years studying the recovery of wild wolf populations in remote north-western Montana and Glacier national park. When she started in the late 1970s on the University of Montana’s Wolf Ecology Project (WEP) – which she later co-led – she was the only female biologist in the US trapping, radio-collaring and following their trails through the snow for research. Boyd’s new memoir, A Woman Among Wolves, charts her life’s work with the animals and looks at the challenges of wolf management across the world today.

What is it about wolves that drew you in?
I grew up in Minnesota, the only state in the lower 48, along with a tiny part of Michigan, where wolves hadn’t been completely extirpated. They were denizens of the wilderness that nobody saw and that fascinated me. They are clever, beautiful and interesting animals. The parallels between wolf and human society are intriguing – like us, they are social, live in family groups and defend their homes. I have also always been a dog person: a dog is kind of a dumbed down version of a wolf.

The successful reintroduction of wolves to Yellowstone national park and central Idaho in 1995 is celebrated as a great wildlife conservation achievement. But what is the untold story?
That wolf recovery has been natural, too. Americans, along with the rest of the world, tend to think of wolves as all reintroduced and that reintroduction is the only way they become re-established: that is wrong. About 15 years prior to the Yellowstone and Idaho reintroductions, and just a few years after they had received federal endangered species status [granted in 1974], they walked down from Canada into north-western Montana and Glacier national park without any help or fanfare. And they began to filter out. The approximately 3,000 wild wolves in the western US today are, in part, because of that natural recolonisation.

Is reintroduction worthwhile, or should we let wolves just return naturally?
It is complicated. The advantage of reintroduction is it jump starts the process. The disadvantage is that wolves that are reintroduced can be resented by people: they’re not seen as native or natural any more, which leads to potentially less tolerance and therefore longevity for them.

An amazing piece of the wolf recovery puzzle is how, enabled by legal protection, wolves have so successfully recolonised western Europe on their own (nowhere in Europe has there been any reintroductions), squeezing into human-dominated landscapes and surviving. Germany, Denmark and even the heavily farmed Netherlands have all become home.

How would a typical year studying the wolves unfold?
Summer was trapping and radio-collaring. It is your classic, ugly, cold, steel foothold trap and it holds the animal against their will by their paw. The chance of success is low but you persist. I rebuilt the traps with modified parts to make them more humane and selective for wolves and we checked them often to minimise the time an animal was held. To fit the radio-collar, we would first tranquilise the wolf – I had a custom-made jab stick – and then wait nearby until it woke up.

Winter was tracking our animals with radio telemetry gear – both from the air (we hired a plane and skilled pilot) and from the ground on skis or snowmobiles. Following a wolf’s tracks in the snow is like reading a story. You can see where they stopped to sniff and pee, where they chased an animal and you learn their travel routes. We would also investigate wolf kills – skiing in after they left to determine what they had taken and its condition.

In spring, wolves den and we didn’t bug them.

You’ve had some hair-raising encounters with all sorts of wild animals. Have you ever been bitten?
I came close with an adolescent wolf we named Ice. We caught her on a cold rainy day and she was hypothermic. We drugged her and a colleague and I lay her on our laps in the front seat of our truck with the heater and our bodies trying to warm her up. As her temperature normalised, I turned the heater down and, though the rest of her was completely still, her ear swivelled in the direction of the click. I thought: “Oh my God, this wolf is fully awake.” I indicated silently to another colleague outside the truck to open the door. What happened next was a whirlwind: she leapt to her feet on top us. I grabbed her by the scruff and directed her snout away as she bit at the steering wheel and the air. My colleague pushed her rump and I fell out of the truck hanging on to her. We landed; she jumped up and ran away. All in the day of a life of a wolf biologist!

The Wolf Ecology Project ran over 15 years until 1995. What did it reveal about wolves that was new?
One of our most surprising findings, which hadn’t been documented before – there weren’t GPS collars then – was the distance wolves can travel: easily hundreds of miles within months. We would often get radio-collars returned from animals that had been shot huge distances away from their last signal or there would be a faraway sighting of a collared wolf. Our longest dispersal, Wolf 8551, was killed having travelled a straight-line distance of 540 miles north into Canada.

What does the future hold for wolves in the US and beyond? The species has been delisted as endangered in parts of the west – Montana, Idaho and Wyoming – and state-managed hunting outside of national parks is now allowed there. Meanwhile, the EU is undertaking a review of wolves conservation status after growing complaints from farmers whose livestock has become prey.
Those US states are required to maintain a population of 150 animals, but no more. And the new hunting laws they have adopted in the past few years are horribly archaic and torturous – allowing for wolves to be taken by virtually any method. In Europe, wolves have been well tolerated, but that has its limits. Wolves are resilient but ultimately their fate is up to us: they exist in the landscape at our whim. I hope we continue to protect them in enough areas that they will always be here.

A company that sells cleaning products is giving customers some surprising advice: wash your clothes less.

Ecover is calling for a change in our laundry habits after research found people felt under societal pressure to wash their clothes more frequently, and were unaware that this could damage the environment.

The brand, in partnership with Falmouth University, is publishing a report this week into the impact of laundry on the environment. The researchers found that 18% of the 2,000 Britons interviewed for the report in August believed – wrongly – that washing less frequently would not affect the planet. One in 10 feel pressure to do laundry more frequently.

The report also found that 75% of participants in recent studies mentioned fear of judgment from others for wearing the same clothes multiple days in a row.

Model and environmental activist Lily Cole, who will chair a panel discussion on the findings in London this week, said she had experienced this. “The attitude has changed in recent years, but I was in the sidebar of shame a few times for wearing the same look on the red carpet,” she said.

“Back then it was seen as a faux pas. Celebrity culture is often an extreme version of what we’re seeing in culture in general: the values, the shaming, the conversation around cleanliness.”

Figures from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) showed the number of wash loads in the UK increased by 9.6% from 6.2bn to 6.8bn between 2005 and 2014. By 2016, the ONS estimated that each household was responsible for 260 wash loads a year.

Pollution from detergent causes serious risks to flora and fauna and natural ecosystems. Changes to the textiles used to make modern clothes have exacerbated the problem – washing clothes made from synthetic fabrics accounts for about 8% of the microplastics released into our water. Microfibre shedding during washes decreases over time, but if “fast fashion” clothes are poorly made and quickly discarded, new clothes are constantly being added to the cycle.

Dr Cui Su, from the school of communication, Falmouth University, who worked on the report said: “For decades, our relationship with laundry has been shaped by powerful cultural forces and advertising that have conditioned us to believe that ‘perfectly clean’ is the only acceptable standard. From the smell of freshly washed clothes to the crispness of fabrics, cleanliness has been presented not just as a necessity, but as a reflection of success.”

In more recent years, influencers have also helped to shape our laundry habits – the hashtag #cleanwithme has 648.4k posts on TikTok and #cleaningobsessed has 162k posts on Instagram. But clean clothes and a large wardrobe of appropriate outfits have a long association with social standing.

Katherine Ashenburg, author of the book Clean: An Unsanitised History of Washing, says: “In the 17th and 18th centuries – among the dirtiest centuries in the west – people, including doctors, believed that changing your linen shirt frequently was a safer and more effective way of removing dirt than washing your body with soap and water. Louis XIV bathed twice in his long life, but he was considered very clean because he changed his shirt several times a day.”

Cole – who said she was wearing the same T-shirt for the second day running for her interview – added: “My mum, who grew up on a mountain in southern Wales without electricity, tells me her mother would spend a whole day handwashing their clothes each week. I must admit I love having a washing machine. But there’s a bigger message here of a mindset towards the things that we own, taking care of them and making investments.

“Build a long-term relationship with clothes and think about the way you wash them, how you repair them and if you can pass them on or donate them if it’s not something you can wear for a long time.”